Friday, July 10, 2009

As a child, I didn't know that lucid dreaming was out of the ordinary. I could always control my dreams, in a way, except not all that well. In fact I think that knowing that I'm dreaming has become so ingrained in me that I stopped even questioning whether I'm dreaming - i.e. I don't know if I know if I'm dreaming or not...

For the past couple of weeks I've tried being more conscious in real life. I needed to start doing this for many reasons. I did the thing where you ask yourself throughout the day whether you're dreaming. The trick is to not dismiss the question, and to really think. You would then get into the habit of thinking about your state of mind, and you'd be able to realize that you're dreaming. At first it was easy: I'd be able to tell right away that I'm not dreaming, and I'd have fresh reasons every time. Then my dreams became more vivid, and the things I thought I couldn't do in my dreams, I was able to do. For example, I read and wrote in my dreams, when I thought I wouldn't be able to. I've yet to see writing on buildings, so that's a pretty good check for now.

Pressing the "pause" button every so often made me realized that I had absolutely no sense of time while at work. Do I have a sense of time at all? Maybe there's a reason why I'm so bad at estimating time... or estimating anything at all...

Then it became harder and harder to pull myself into full consciousness, to really question without any distraction whether I was dreaming. Eventually the answer came out to be: "I don't know. I don't know if I'm dreaming or not. How do I tell? It's impossible to tell!"

And in the end, it doesn't matter. So long as I treat all existence the same way - whether it's existence in "life" or in my dreams - and try to fix a minimum standard for existence in both realms... I'll be fine.

My question would no longer be: "Am I dreaming?" but "Am I existing in the way I want?"